You’re shaking … so am I. It’s because of Jerusalem, isn’t it? One doesn’t go to Jerusalem, one returns to it. That’s one of its mysteries.

In Jerusalem, the skies are closer.

If a congregation somewhere comes to life as Jerusalem at some hour, that carries no necessary implications for either the past or the future of that congregation. The Jerusalem occurrence is sufficient unto itself. There is—then and there—a transfiguration in which the momentary coincides with the eternal, the innocuous becomes momentous and the great is recognized as trivial, the end of history is revealed as the fulfillment of life here and now, and the whole of creation is beheld as sanctified.

We felt proud and exultant to arrive with the Jewish flag at our mast. The refugees looked for the first time upon the Holy Land with wondering and often tear-filled eyes. This was the sight for which they had longed with all their hearts, the sight for which they had risked their lives crossing one illegal border after another and on the high seas.

The first visit involves the challenge of the unknown, curiosity, adventure, often youth, and sometimes adrenaline. On a revisit, you are returning older, with more life experience under your belt, to familiar territory; it is not so challenging, your curiosity is not so piqued, you know more or less what to expect, you have less adrenaline pumping. You feel different, not necessarily worse or better, just different. This is true not just for returning to locales but also for trying to recapture any past experience.

It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.

Jerusalem is so permeated with layers and textures, minglings of all kinds that, once you've lived there you don't get over it.

It was fate that delivered me and my contemporaries into this great era, when the Jews returned to and re-established their homeland. I am no longer a wandering Jew who migrates from country to country, from exile to exile. But all Jews in every generation must regard themselves as if they had been there, in previous generations, places, and events. Therefore, I am still a wandering Jew, but not along the far-flung paths of the world. Now I migrate through the expanses of time, from generation to generation, down the paths of memory.

Your homecoming will be my homecoming

At the foundation of the issue is the traditional Zionist concept of aliyah, a Hebrew term meaning the "in gathering" or return of Diaspora Jews to the Palestine homeland. Ever since 1948, and the creation of the state of Israel, aliyah has become a basic imperative of Israeli government policy.
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It is a permanent physical migration to Palestine, not just a visit.
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Our first leader, former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion said that Zionism without a 'return to Zion' is phony. Not many American Jews migrate permanently to Israel. Some say that all Jews, by definition, are Zionists. Others say that a Jew is not a Zionist unless he's a member who pays dues to an actively Zionist organization. Definitions have been tossed everywhere since the Jewish homeland became a reality.

Every believer departing this old earth …immediately transitions into heaven and is welcomed home by Jesus himself.

Home is where every traveller returns after a journey, however long. When night falls, the visitor must take his leave of his hosts.

For the Jew, the immediacy of his remote past is an intimate reality. He is living among places whose names are enshrined in his racial literature and they make sweet music to his ears. From Dan to Beersheba, he can now make a journey – Nazareth, Galilee, Jerusalem, all these and so many more belong to him in a special sense, for they whisper in his blood, and evoke memories of a time that was, before he was compelled to seek shelter in reluctant lands. When therefore the Arab says that the Jew should find a home anywhere except in Palestine he asks something the Jew cannot concede without mutilating his racial personality beyond endurance. It is no answer to say that many centuries have passed into history since the Jew was at home in Palestine. If he had been permitted the security of a safe home elsewhere, the answer might do. But, as we know, it was not so.

I who lived in Jerusalem for very long, I worshipped under the calls of its minarets, and submitted to the will of God under the rhythm of its church bells. I was exiled from my beloved Palestine. I am thirsty, I am longing to return to Jerusalem, I am longing to beautify my eyes with it before I die.